The Missing Layer in Healing: Fascia, Trauma, and Why Pain Comes Back with Jason van Blerk

We're living in one of the most medicated, most therapized, most self-help saturated times in history. Mental health is worse than it's ever been. Anxiety has become a new epidemic amongst adults and children. What do you think that we're fundamentally getting wrong in our modern world? And what do you think that the body this whole time has been wanting to show us or tell us?

I feel we have a systemic issue, which is we are stuck in the lower parts of us, the animalistic side— fight, survival, food, competition. And because we're there, then people are so busy fighting for survival. And because they're fighting for survival, they don't have time. And if they don't have time, then they want quick solutions. And so we tend to go for the fastest way to relieve pain rather than the reason why it was there in the first place. So it's like, okay, well, that pill will take away my pain so I can continue to function. Eventually that won't work anymore. And this is the problem, is we're going to quick solutions.

Jason Van Vlerk, welcome to Rooted in Wellness.

Thank you.

The intention of this podcast when I first started was to help as many people as humanly possible. And I feel like when I found you and Human Garage, there was a similar mission and then call it divine timing, but then I finally met you and I really trust that everything happens in the right time. So I'm so thrilled that you're going to share this message today. Thanks for coming.

Thank you. I'm excited. Let's do it.

So another part of the intention is to really help people feel more rooted, rooted in themselves, rooted in their health, their happiness, and what I believe is everyone's inherent, like, knowing that your body can heal themselves. Tell me, are there 2 or 3 practices every day that help you feel rooted in who you are?

Yeah. Funny enough, one that I started very intensely a couple of months ago Is walking barefoot. So I went to barefoot shoes like many years ago, but I hadn't gone fully barefoot. And I did an experiment. I walked for about 6 weeks through London, Switzerland, Bali, all over through airports barefoot.

Come on.

And I think it was kind of funny because, you know, it's, it's very socially different when you're walking barefoot everywhere. And the one thing that really stopped me from doing it was the chemicals.

Yeah.

You know, I'm walking on gasoline and cleaning products and all this stuff on the ground. And so it stopped me. But then a friend of mine was doing it and inspired me. So I decided to go for a couple of weeks. I did it. And if I felt better from doing it, then the chemicals didn't matter.

Right.

That was my, my logic around it. So I did it for a couple of weeks. My feet started to get bigger. They started to get wider. I started to get stronger. I had more energy. I even craved going for walks. I was like, I really wanna go for a walk. I wanna put my feet on the ground. And so as socially awkward and dirty as it could be, you know, such a simple thing, putting our feet on the earth can make such a positive impact on the body.

Mm-hmm.

And that's because we're electromagnetic and the earth is electromagnetic and we sync to the frequency of the earth. But if I put a sole between us of plastic, I'm not going to get the electricity into my body to help replenish.

Right.

It's like charging your phone, right? You plug it into the wall and you charge it. Well, we should plug into the earth and charge ourselves when we're dealing with EMFs and chemicals and all these things throughout the day, and we're not. So, the first thing is really get out into nature and put your body on the ground because that's going to remove a lot of electrons that no longer need to be there. Then, moving the body. There's many ways that people can move, and some people do tai chi or yoga or workout. The practice that we created in 2020, it targets the fascia. And I've been doing that for about 6 years. And, you know, my life has transformed as a result of doing that daily. But it unwinds all the tension around your entire body. You know, you release emotions, you reduce stress, more energy, better digestion whenever I do it. The third one— you asked for 3?

Yeah, I know you've got another. You've got good ones. So I want to hear the third one.

So the third practice that I like to do You know, one that I just started doing recently was meditation.

Hmm.

And I, I really feel that, you know, the body has 4 components that we can target when we're working with somebody in the healing space: the mind, the body, the emotions, and the energetics. And one of the things that I found is if you work on one of them, but you don't do the others, there's a lag or it doesn't fully sit. And so You know, fascial maneuvers is a very holistic practice. It hits the physical body, it— your emotions come up, you know, you're saying affirmations in programming language, so you're, you're rewiring the mental side. And then there's an energetic component to it. But meditation for me was kind of detaching from all of this. You know, you're detaching from your thoughts, from your body, from your emotions, everything. You go to a a complete state of nothingness. And in that complete state of nothingness, there's a lot of things. And that's what quantum physics is now saying is this empty space around us is actually fully charged with potential energy that can be utilized for anything that we want. And so meditation has now been, you know, the next component of what I'm doing. And I think that they all work hand in hand with each other.

So powerful. I think what you just described is another part of what I really want our audience to understand is We talk so much about integrative healthcare, but we're not actually practicing it. And the cool thing with growing up with yoga is that we recognize just different parts of the human body. And then whenever we go to heal or try to heal or feel better, we're only dealing with one system, which makes no sense. So when you were walking barefoot, did you ever get sick?

No.

No. Yeah, I would think, you know, I could see walking through an airport, like bleaches and chemical cleaners and stuff like that. I'm sure you got a lot of looks. I think that the earth was pulling it out more than I 100%, because you're connecting. So what I love about that, why I'm kind of hovering on this for a second, is we talk about grounding and everyone just says, oh, you walk barefoot to ground, but we don't think about walking barefoot to connect with source energy and pulling energy up to support our body in functioning its best. That was very different.

Yeah, the tree huggers had something.

Yeah, they were onto something.

As weird as it was, it's like, you know, the body's an electrical system. Meaning that every cell in the body has a charge. So, you're like— a healthy cell sits around -20, -25 millivolts.

Mm-hmm.

And, a regenerating new cell is at -50. So, these are in the minuses. But, if you go up into +30, that's cancer. So, somewhere along the line, we are an electrical system and we can measure cancer to healthy. And, what happens is if I'm sitting in an office in a chair staring at a screen with LED lights and all this stuff around me, those, those potential energies, the voltages start to go towards the cancerous side. It starts to go positive. And if we don't regenerate, if I don't go out into nature, stare at the sun, jump in the ocean, you know, hug a tree, whatever it might be, I'm not recharging these batteries. And then people are wondering why they, you know, why they feel so tired throughout the day or that they can't sleep because the body's, the voltage is off. And, and we are electrical beings. And if we don't take care of that part of us, then You're gonna see issues in the organs, the emotions, all that kind of stuff.

By the time I get to working with somebody, we talk about root cause healing, but they're so far from recognizing what the root cause is that we're trying to address so many fires at the exact same time. I heard you say that being on this journey, you've noticed profound changes in your body, your physiology, your emotional body, your spiritual body as well. Do you notice when you drift and you go back to old patterns? What are some things that cause you to feel uprooted that maybe our audience could recognize as being something that would be uprooting?

You know, I find self-awareness is kind of lost in today's world, right?

Yeah.

And it starts when we're young. You know, no, no, no, don't express your emotion. Don't feel your emotion. Go over there and be quiet.

Stop crying. Stop crying.

Um, sit still. Sit still. Or wait until you go to the bathroom. You know, these are all things that the body is saying something and then we're overriding it with a command from our programming.

Right.

And so this disconnection of our bodies is creating a lot of problems for us long term, because if I don't know my body and I go and I am with me 100% of the time and I go to somebody else to tell me what's wrong with me, but they only get like 30 minutes with me and one test and they're not looking at the entire system. It's absolutely crazy that you know, in such a small, such little data, we're diagnosing people for why they have what they have. And so one of the first things that I did was I basically, when I started this journey for myself, I was alone for 2 years. I didn't date anybody. I didn't want to like interact because I wanted to become my own best friend. I wanted to understand my body again. And that was an interesting journey because You know, I, I would sit, uh, I would sit on my property in, in Canada and I'd be out on the, on the grass and I would sit there trying to feel the energy around me. And, and this was kind of a new concept to me at the time. I had a— I was, I was dog sitting and so the dog was sitting next to me. And when the dog would have a reaction to something that was like 40 feet away, I would feel what the dog was feeling.

Mm-hmm.

So I would tune into the dog and I would notice that. And what happened was I started to build a relationship with my body. I was like, oh, that's interesting. So the dog can feel something from 40 feet away. If I can tune into the dog when it does that, then I can make that connection.

Yeah.

And then after practicing that for a couple of weeks, I was sitting in my house and I had just moved in. I was renting the place and I felt somebody on my property. Like, I felt somebody enter the space and I was like, what's going on? I feel like someone's here. I look outside. And there's somebody in my yard, in my backyard. I'm like, that's weird. It was the gardener.

Yeah.

Right? But I didn't know. I became aware. And so this process of, of understanding what my body's trying to tell me, you know, nobody can do it but you. You have to sit with yourself and do different exercises, whether it's, you know, closing your eyes, tuning into your heart, and just spend a couple of minutes feeling where your heart is, or tuning into your thoughts and noticing if they're racing or if they're calmer today or more creative, or when you start thinking more negative, Or more positively. So this process took me— it took me some time to rebuild this relationship. Once I became self-aware, I noticed the areas where I was off.

Hmm.

So, you know, you can't change unless you know that something's wrong. So if I don't know that I smell bad, how can I do something about it? So first step is become self-aware. What are the things that I'm doing in my life that are not serving me? Okay, I pick one of those things and I work on it. You know, I say, when this happens and I fall back into this pattern, I have another plan and I go into that plan. And as a result of that, I can catch myself when I fall off. And then if I keep catching myself, eventually I'll make the change. And this goes for all behavior change. You have to know what you're doing wrong and what you're going to do as a plan B when it happens. So it's a fallback plan that you, you create a new habit or you rewire a new Way of doing things. Exactly.

I think we live in a society where we're almost being guided to go more numb. We've normalized symptoms and suffering and feeling stress. And often as a coach, when I ask my clients, you know, the level of stress that they feel every day, people always say typically around 7 to 10. But then I'll say, well, if I were to step into your body, what number would I feel? And more often than not, I'm met with tears because there's this awareness, self-awareness of God, I felt like this for a really long time. I've normalized living this way. And you can think of the cascade of impact that that would happen over your entire body, right? So a little teaser before we move on. Jason, I think that what you and your incredible team do is part of unlocking human potential and intelligence.

Mm-hmm.

I was able to experience a session with Jason and Ayesha, and You gave me a feeling that I haven't felt in over 20 years when I was given a spiritual name. And I had a moment of just feeling bliss in my body. Oh, I get emotional thinking about it. And when you feel even a split second of bliss in your body, you realize that you're in full control of how you feel and how you can move through this world. So I say that for everyone to stick around for this. We're going to dive into some rapid-fire questions before we get into the good stuff. All right, so whatever comes to mind. Sure. GLP-1 drugs, cold plunges, red light therapy— billion-dollar industries built around the body, but not one of them touches the fascia. Why?

Where's the money?

You can rewire someone's nervous system with your hands. No drugs, no devices, no diagnosis. What would it look like if this was part of standard care?

Kindness. Global kindness.

Overrated or underrated? Stretching.

Overrated.

You've put your hands on thousands of bodies. What's one thing that almost every single one of them has in common, regardless of age or fitness level or why they came to see you?

Almost everybody has a left shoulder that's higher, right hip that's higher. It's a torque pattern.

AI is about to replace most of what the human mind does. The one thing that it can never replicate is the healing intelligence of human touch. Is the most radical health technology of the future actually within our hands?

100%.

I thought you'd say that. You are the healer. That's the core messaging.

And it's also in our minds.

Yeah, of course. Yeah. What we allow ourselves to believe. So let's just go deeper into that. We're living in one of the most medicated, most therapized, most self-help saturated times in history. Mental health is worse than it's ever been. Anxiety has become a new epidemic amongst adults and children. What do you think that we're fundamentally getting wrong in our modern world? And what do you think that the body this whole time has been wanting to show us or tell us? Let's look at the biggest question ever.

I feel there's— we have a systemic issue, which is, you know, we're, we are stuck in the lower parts of us, the animalistic side, fight, You know, survival, food, competition. And because we're there, you know, then people are so busy fighting for survival. And because they're fighting for survival, they don't have time. And if they don't have time, then they want quick solutions. Right. And so we, we, we tend to go for the fastest way to relieve pain rather than the reason why it was there in the first place. So it's like, okay, well, that pill will take away my pain so I can continue to function. Eventually that, that won't work anymore. And this is the problem is we're going to quick solutions. You know, the technology that's out today, I see a lot of people, they don't do anything throughout the day to take care of themselves and then they sit in front of a machine for like 30 minutes. Right. And if you're doing 30 minutes of self-care and we live in the world that we live in today, it's not enough. Like go to the Blue Zones. They don't have EMF. They don't have the chemicals in the environment. They don't have sitting in chairs. You know, they're moving all day. They're out in nature. So I think that we're just offloading our care to quick, short-term solutions rather than building a lifestyle that's healthy. You know, if you have to be at a computer all day, find a way to do it outside. You know, create a little space for you so you get some fresh air or, you know, you've got the ground on your feet. So there's at least some balance point. And when there is pain, rather than going to try and solve the problem, find the reason why it's there. And if there's something, something small that you can change in your life that can make a radical shift, maybe it's, you know, a partner of yours or your job or something. It could be something. It could be something really small. It could be something also very big. But find the reason why it was there, because pain is never really what we think it is. Right. You think that that knee pain is because you have been running a lot, but it's more than that, you know? And so if we can find the reason why, Then you can actually get to the solution of it.

Isn't it crazy that we live in a world where if we get 30 to 60 minutes of movement a day, we treat that as a win?

We're celebrating.

We're celebrating. Oh my God, I did it today. I showed up for 60 minutes. This is incredible. Wild. It should be the opposite in so many ways, right?

Build a lifestyle around it.

Build a lifestyle around it. Yeah. So I think the reason why anxiety is coming up as a point of topic, one, knowing so many people who suffer from it, especially with what's happening in the media and politics today, but too, from my healing journey and living through my heart surgeries and stuff like that. Looking back, I know it has nothing to do with my actual heart. And often when I think of anxiety, I try to help my clients uncover what the body's trying to communicate within. Like, when did it start? How old were you? What happened around that time? And even when I think about this word inflammation that's being thrown around for everything. If an organ within you or your blood or your hip or your knee, as you mentioned, was trying to communicate with you, what would it say? It's like a different way of identifying with the emotions instead of blaming. Like, we're blaming our anxiety, our sadness, our depression, which causes us to go to the doctor, and then often that comes with a prescription drug. But are you often seeing this correlation between emotions and the physical body?

Yeah, I mean, a lot of the time, something happens when we're young. It's almost always before 7, right? And, you know, before 7, you're just downloading the rules and, and, and way that society functions. So you're just like, it's like when you're, you buy a new phone and you download the software, right? And so whatever you absorb in that, in that state, you don't have a filter. So if a situation happens to you, you know, and it's traumatic, it could even be as something as small as your mom didn't want you to buy candy when you're at the candy store and you were angry at her, right? And that created a trauma. Well, that sits in the body somewhere. And, you know, over the years, if we aren't emotionally aware and work through it, then it starts to manifest in the world around us. For example, road rage, right? If you felt good in your life, and someone cut you off in traffic, would you have road rage?

No.

So that suppressed emotion was stored in the body. And this person cutting you off in traffic was your healer. They stepped in front of you to trigger those emotions that you weren't able to process from that breakup or from your boss at work or whatever it might be. And so, you know, we're, we're in this balance point of we're holding these emotions from a very young age and they're coming up and influencing our life today. And that can manifest as anxiety. It can manifest as, you know, chronic diseases or something in the organs or tension somewhere. And so I agree with your approach, which is really to, to go to the childhood and to understand, you know, where did these things start from? A lot of the time when people come to me and they're like, I had this shoulder injury come up, and I'm like, what happened 6 months before that? Or 1 year before that? Usually in that 6-month to 1-month or 1-year range is the answer.

Yeah.

The reason why that they're in that situation in the first place. So I like to ask questions to really understand where people are at. The body has a language, like, you know, knees are support and you've got your shoulders carrying the weight of things, your throat is expressing, your neck is direction. So yes, there's body language and you can read and interpret it to understand what's going on in somebody. But I do like to, to understand what happened when they were younger, what happened 6 months to 1 year before the issue came in.

So you do this in a really specific language of the fascia. And, uh, I don't even know if I told you this, but after I became a yoga teacher, I became a fascial stretch therapist. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. You never told me.

Which was very mechanical on a table. But when I was able to use it in my own way and was able to stretch someone's fascia before yoga, it just brought ease because obviously range of motion increased and happiness went up and Now we're kind of hearing and understanding the fascia through a different light. I think primarily because of the work that you do and the science that's emerging, because we needed science to validate what ancient wisdom has always known. But the fascia is actually connected to our nervous system. So maybe for listeners, if you were to help them understand, like, just how profound the fascia is, can you give us the fascia 101?

Yeah. I mean, the traditional way of looking at fascia is it's like this spiderweb connective tissue. that surrounds your muscles like a Saran Wrap.

Like if you go to— I always say the chicken breast at the store with that white film on top, that's like a little—

Exactly.

Yeah.

But that is once it's died. So when it's in a living system, it operates very differently. And I can show you a video in a moment just to kind of visualize what I'm talking about. But fascia is, you know, it's more than this connective tissue spiderweb. It's actually Water. And, you know, if I cut you right now and you're 70% water, you don't squirt water out. So my question was like, well, where, where is the water? Why doesn't it do that? It doesn't make sense. It's because it's not in a liquid state. You know, water has 4 phases. The 4th one nobody was really talking about. And I mean, there are people now, but the 4th phase of water is essentially structured water, and it's more like a jelly consistency. And our fascia lives in this gel-like substance, and it— because it's water, it holds memory, it holds emotions, and it can conduct electricity. And we know that because people have studied the properties of water. Veda Austin and the Japanese scientists, you know, they used to put stuff next to water droplets. They would then freeze the water and measure it under a microscope, and you could see whatever the water was next to, it would take that picture inside the water. So if you put it next to a plant, it would actually like create that— the tree in the water droplet. So water is hyper-intelligent. It can hold memory, it can hold emotions, and it conducts electricity. So if you're 70% water and, and that's your fascia, and it's this gel-like state, and it has all of these components to it, there's a hyper-intelligence that's happening inside of our fascia that's not happening inside of the bones or the muscles. The organs. It's different. The other thing that we found was it's the only organ in your body that you can't cut out. Hmm. Good point. So, you know, you're basically our fascia and everything sits and floats inside of it. Your muscles, your bones, your tendons, your ligaments, and your organs float inside of the fascia. So if you've got a restriction right here for in your fascia because it's calcified and hardened, well, now my rib comes out. my organs get pulled up, my, my back becomes tight. And so if I go and adjust a bone or stretch a muscle over here, it didn't deal with the calcification of the fascia over here. And so what we do is we unwind that. And I want to show you—

Yes.

Let me show you a video of what fascia looks like, because it's hard to visualize. But once you see it on fascia magnified, so anybody can find this fascia magnified 25 times on YouTube. And ignore the commentary about it, but essentially— Yeah, I see. These are water tubules. So what happens is, this is a water tubule and it's sending information. When you have an emotion or when you move, it breaks, the tube breaks, and it reconnects to another spot. You also see blood vessels that run through here. You'll see the red stuff. And so this is you. This is inside the forearm, by the way. This is a living forearm. So cut right here, they lifted the skin, and you can see how the fascia behaves. Now, if you do this on a dead body, it's dried up.

Right.

And what I believe is happening is this water, this gel starts to calcify and harden when we, you know, sit in a position for too long, or when we have like a movement pattern that we're reinforcing. It wants to optimize the movement. So it starts to calcify. And harden, which restricts movement.

But our movement pattern every day is sitting down at a desk hunched over with tech neck.

100%. And it's, yeah, and it's, it's one of the worst things that we can do for the human body is sitting in a chair. Because what it does is it, the kidneys back here start to get pressed up that you're basically pushing on your kidneys. You're blocking the fascia in your lower back, under your legs to behind your knees. In the front, you're, you're, because when we squat, The body can breathe differently. But when you're sitting in a chair, all this upper body weight sits on top of the organs and the diaphragm, so they don't massage properly, they don't move properly. So now things become stagnant in here. So we're turning off the kidneys, we're stagnating all of the organs in the front, our digestive system, and then we're locking up the entire body on the back. So our posture changes. And, you know, the long-term implications of this, I don't I don't think we fully understand it yet.

We were never meant to sit in chairs, were we? Like, I think about when I go home to Denmark, or sorry, to India, my other land. When I go home to India, everyone's squatting. Kids, adults, seniors, 80-year-olds, 90-year-olds, right? They're just so used to squatting and moving. And when you're squatting and moving, one, I think we're now calling it a longevity exercise, which is crazy, where you're constantly moving. And I can imagine the rush of blood also within your body's blood pressures.

Mm-hmm.

It's so powerful. And I just wanna call out, so just for people who are listening, check out this video because of Jason, I now use this with all of my clients. So when we go to treat pain, and let's just use back pain 'cause so many people suffer from back pain, you'll go to see like a physio or a chiro and they'll treat your back or your neck. But Jason, when he was like kind of ruffling up or pinching the front of his body, we don't think about the lack of movement or flow or energy being from that spot, and no one's even addressing that. But you can see how that would cause restriction within the back, compression within the spine, which would cause more pain. We don't think about that with the fascial system.

The body is a balloon. So if I tighten the front, it will get tight on the back, right? If I have tension here, I'll have tension on my hip on the other side. So it's like a— it goes through. So if you drew me like a circle, and you tightened over here, it would create tension on the opposite side of it.

Right.

Directly across from it. And also on the concept of a balloon, what I mean by that is we are pressurized. So, you know, if you go up in an airplane, your ears pop. And the reason why is because we have air molecules or atmospheric pressure around us, and we have inside pressure balancing us between the inside and the outside. Now, if I go really high, the air pressure changes. So my ears pop to regulate the internal pressure. To balance it with the outside. So, you know, everybody's got one foot bigger than the other, like a left foot bigger than the right usually, and then the chest. And it's because there's a dysregulation of pressure. So going back to what you're saying about squatting, when you bend your ankles and you bend your knees, if I push my fingers up right now, fluid will go into the arm. So when you squat, you bend all of that and you push the fluid, the air, the fascia, and everything up into the shoulders, the rib cage, the neck, the head. So squatting is regulating pressure between the left and the right side of the body, but also between your toes and your top of your head. So it's a pressure regulation exercise to redistribute the pressure where it's on, where it's dysregulated.

Right.

So if we see the body as a pressurized system, you know, all these little things that we're putting on the body have a big impact. Like if I, if I put an elastic band around your waist for 10 hours a day, every day for 60 years, you know, what's gonna happen? If this is a balloon and I tie a knot right here, there's going to be pressure above and below, and you're going to have a weird line around your hips. And you start to see people as they get older, they get, you know, the— there's like these lines that happen. Wearing a tight watch will pull the body off. So the body is very sensitive to pressure. And if we understand that, then we would change the way that we're We're, we're, we're wearing clothes, we're working with it.

God, I'm thinking bras and underwires and restrictive clothing and God forbid corsets. Don't wear corsets.

Bras drive anxiety. This is to go back to your thing about anxiety. If I squeeze your lungs, the lungs are, the lungs are the highest priority of the body. Yeah, pretty much, you know, you have food, water, and then you've got air, right? Without air, It's over. So if I squeeze your lungs, the body goes, I am in a huge threat right now. So it drives stress hormones, it drives, it drives anxiety. And so if taking off bras is actually going to help with anxiety as well for women, take off your bras, ladies.

That's crazy. And it's funny too, maybe I'm just hearing things through a different light from you because I trust you. But it just makes sense. It's so much more than just slight fascial restriction. You're training your body to behave and be in a different way for so long. So I'm guessing when think about this through the scientific lens and the medical community, they would have maybe not given this much attention because they're looking at dead cadavers. But why has ancient wisdom known about this for so long? Like when we think about studies of Ayurveda and srotas and, you know, traditional Chinese medicine around meridians of the body, understanding that there's a network built into the human physiology for detoxification and nutrients movement and absorption and stuff like that and communication? Any guesses? Or do you have this thought?

Hmm, you know, I think that there are agendas for us to not understand our bodies. And so a lot of this stuff gets buried.

Yeah.

You know, even some science on fascia that was released over 20 years ago was buried. And really still can't find it today.

Come on.

And it said that, you know, fascia has a brain and it's hyper intelligent. And it said all these things that we're talking about today. And You know, it's, it's, it's because if we understand ourselves, then we're empowered. And, uh, you know, some of this information has been out for 5,000 years. You have everything inside of you to literally achieve anything that you want, much more than healing, you know. And, and I think if we, if we hand that to everybody, then they're going to be very powerful. And I think that there's a lot of forces that don't want that. So I think that's why. Um, the second thing is it's money. I want to go— going back to your question about why isn't fascia being studied or as much as— where's, where's the money?

Yeah.

Because, you know, fascia is a service-based industry if you're going to use it for money or economics, whereas a supplement or a technological device or, you know, going to a hospital and paying $60,000 for some sort of treatment, right? Whereas if I could just go inside and meditate or do some fascial work on myself, you know, that costs absolutely nothing. And so I always say, follow the money when it comes to understanding why things are being done in the wellness space.

Right. Ask questions. Yeah. A lot of people will not make money if people aren't sick and suffering.

And you have to fund the researchers. So like, there are some really amazing scientists and researchers out there that are doing amazing work, but nobody's giving them the money. So they're so limited in the number of people they can get for their studies and all of these kinds of things. So I think it's a really big component of it. And what we're doing is we're just telling the world that you can heal yourself and you can literally do it for free and you can do it in like 15 minutes a day. And all you need to do is just move your body a little bit. And by doing that, we're putting the power back in the hands of the people. Now the researchers are coming to say, what are you guys doing with this fascial maneuvers thing? Like, they're coming to us now saying, we want to study this.

Wow. Fascinating. Something that happens when you do your yoga teacher training, even if you don't want to be a yoga teacher, if you ever have the opportunity to do a teacher training, go and do it. Week 3 of yoga teacher training, teachers are dropping like flies from their mat, meaning they're leaving their mat to go and have an emotional release, a cry, a purge. They get pissed off or angry. They just I remember, you know, just having a day I looked up and everyone was gone during class. And I remember how profound the feeling was in that moment because it felt like release. And together, living in a community like that for over a month, it felt like collective release. And now we have incredible people like Gabor Maté, or there's the famous book, The Body Keeps Score, where the intelligence is has kind of been like brought to our awareness, but it almost seems too simple because people— maybe it's not too simple. People have to really start thinking about— to think about how they're feeling. And I can imagine that when people end up in front of you on their table, it's a place that they might not want to go. Is that true?

Yeah. I mean, everybody's at a different starting point, right? The main thing is really, do they feel safe? If somebody doesn't feel safe, absolutely no way that they're going to release trauma or an emotion. Right? If you're in like the middle of Walmart, you know, you're not gonna like break down crying unless it's like absolutely impossible not to. Right. And so we'll work with people who, you know, they want to hang on to that identity. Yeah, they want to hang on to that emotion or that trauma.

Who are you without it?

Who are you without it? It's so comfortable. It's all you've ever known. It's a story you tell everybody every single day that you see them. And so there's this loop and this comfort with our traumas and our emotions and our pain. And it's very scary stepping into this unknown. Who would I be without this? And so, yes, there are sometimes moments when I meet people and they're not ready to release.

Mm-hmm.

That's from the side where they're interested and they believe in the work, but they're not ready. And then you'll get the side that they don't believe in it, right? If somebody doesn't believe, you might as well not even try. Because, and they know this in the pharmaceutical world, because what happened when they wanted to get a drug passed for mainstream was they had to beat the placebo.

Right.

And they couldn't in the United States anymore because people were losing faith in the medical system. So you know what they did? They took it to Africa. And then people in Africa saw, oh, intellectual, highly educated doctor wearing a white coat is here in front of me giving me this drug. Boom, beats the placebo. Now, if it works for one group of humans, it will work for the rest. So now they were able to pass those drugs. So belief is so powerful when it comes to helping the body. And if I'm working with somebody that's a skeptic, then there's so much ego involved or closed offness that it's, it's, it's not even worth it anymore. So there are times where I actually say to people, I can't help you. And you know, that's always an interesting conversation after, 'cause they're like, but what do you mean you can't help me? You help all these other people. So sometimes it actually does work where they now open up because they realize that they were blocking it. But at the end of the day, I'm not here to try and convince anybody of anything. I just want to share my experience. And if it inspires somebody, then, you know, hopefully it helps them.

And obviously, you know, everything is happening and unfolding the way that it is because of the profound shifts that people have experienced with you. So let's go back to that moment where I had a session with you and Ayesha. 2 things I wanna point out. One, if you're listening and maybe you're like me, I never really gave myself permission to talk about trauma because I didn't grow up in a household where there was, God forbid, like sexual abuse or like my mother, alcoholism and physical abuse and stuff like that. So I never gave myself permission to go there. Do you wanna maybe say something to the people who might've felt the same? Like maybe their trauma was the teacher or the bully at school and—

Yeah, you know, a lot of the time people don't even think that they had trauma. It's because it's usually tied to like sexual abuse, right? Or physical abuse, or bullying. And I go, I go back to what I said about the child in the candy store, you know, a trauma is not the event. It's your reaction to it. It's the way that you felt about it. Because I could be in a car accident. And have absolutely no perception that that was a trauma to me. Be like, I feel amazing, I'm great, and just keep going. But there are moments where, you know, something happens to you, it brings up a deep emotion that you cannot process. And because you cannot process it, that creates essentially what we call a trauma. It's a— it's an unprocessed emotion stored in the body. And the deeper the emotion, the deeper the trauma. There's a lot of people who, who don't associate with trauma because of the way that society uses that word.

Exactly.

But it can be the smallest thing to the biggest Thank you.

And the way that we experience it is often the same, whatever the scale of it was, right? Yeah.

I mean, that kid in the candy store could have felt the same depth of emotion as someone who was bullied in school. Right. And so it's how you feel about it. It's not the event.

So I'm also not the type of person, like, I typically don't cry in front of a lot of people. I am an introvert. I'm shy. I obviously repressed a lot of things, so I'm used to holding a lot of things. And when you see people in your videos, they're often having very sometimes dramatic sighs or laughs or cries or screams. And I thought I would never be that person until I was in your hands. And the release that came with mostly on my right side and then the cueing of specific words to support me in having a release. Guys, this is all on my social media, go and check it out. But like, I just, I sobbed and I screamed. And at one point, it felt like pain that was so deep that I, I was like, oh my God, that's where this has been held for so long. Can you talk to us a little bit about what people are releasing in those moments? And I'm going to call it an art that you've probably mastered by working on the human body for so long, the patterns that you're seeing, what are we releasing in those moments?

It's the deep-seated emotions that have been stored for a long time. And the, you know, we might tie it to a breakup, we might tie it to the bullying, we might tie it to abuse. It's less about the story. It's the fact that the emotion was stored there. And when we work with the body, I kind of see it as a computer, right? If I know which buttons to push, I know how to create the response. And so when somebody walks into a room and we begin to work with them, there's a feeling you get. It's not something I see. It's not something they tell me. It's a feeling.

Mm-hmm.

And that feeling is usually there's something being held in this part of the body, and it might be related to their father. And so when I'm working with them, that's— I'll use programming language or affirmations around that insight in that area of the body. And at that moment is when people have like the biggest releases. Like I was working with a young girl, she was 17, 18 years old, her father left, she had a lot of stuff going on there. And for some reason, I didn't know the full story. But I was called to push in here and I, and I twist the fascia, I was working there, and I had her say some stuff. And boom, it just like came out. And You know, I would like to say I can— I knew that was going to happen, but you don't know what you're going to get when you're pushing on the body. But there's certain parts of the body that everybody stores things. There's certain areas where they store specific emotions. There's certain areas where I touch where almost everybody's going to have an emotional response. So you never know what you're going to get when you're working with the human body. But there's usually an insight or some intuition that guides me to work on certain areas.

In some ways it felt like it was completely out of the blue. Like you're stretching, we're moving, you're getting deeper, you're getting deeper. And then bang, it's out of nowhere, out of nowhere, just full release and like sigh, cry out loud, which, um, which really surprised me. But there's something else that happened after that moment. And I think that this is also unique, is you gave me space to stop, integrate.

Mm-hmm.

Sit up and then walk around. And the first time that I did that after the first release, I felt already from that moment that I was in a different body. And I thought the session was over after that. I was like, this is incredible. The sky looked bluer, my posture felt taller, and I almost couldn't feel the ground beneath me. I just felt so good in that moment. And then you said, okay, well, come on back, we're going back in.

Yes.

Then we went on the left side of the body first, or did we go to the jaw?

We did the right side of your body. No, the left side first. Then we did the right side. Then we did the jaw.

Okay, so left side of the body. Ayesha comes in. Now I feel a different sense of an energy from, from her coming in. And she was working on my hips. And I thought, yeah, yeah, like I'm a mom, I birth babies. I'm aware of, you know, my hip area constriction and stuff like that. But she said something to the essence of Trusting myself again. And then boom. Oh my God, I felt like a complete release. I needed to hear from somebody else to trust myself again and to be at home in my body again and to trust kind of my evolution and my path. And another deep release, and I could get up. And again, my posture felt taller again. I felt like my body was almost being put back together.

Mm-hmm.

And I'm going into detail about all of this? Because often, we see the videos that you're posting online, we see the release, but I think a lot of people are wondering, well, what's actually happened? What did that feel like afterwards? So what do you see on the differences on the left side of the body? And are you noticing trends within men and women on these meridians?

Yeah, so the left side of the body is— it generally leans towards the feminine side. So feminine energy, receiving, relationship to mother, relationship to woman. Right. Or relationship to self, it's more feminine. And then the right side of the body is relationship to the masculine side. My father, my, uh, the men in my life, my actions, doing in the physical world. It's more physical. And so I find like if I do a, you know, a hand release on the right side versus the left, it's very different because we're overdoing in the, in the world that we live in today. So the right hand hurts significantly more usually for most people. You know, and if you've got, for example, if I'm working on your right side, and I start, you know, you start reacting in a certain way. And it's unexpected, you know, that to me tells me there's likely something going on with your father, your man in your life, or the masculine energy somewhere, maybe you're over-masculine as a woman, or you're, you know, over-feminine as a man. And so The body tells you things as you start pushing on it. And the right side versus the left, it's usually masculine versus feminine. And the, the patterns, as I mentioned in the rapid-fire questions, you know, the left side of the body, people tend to have a left shoulder that's higher. And so if this left shoulder goes higher, then the neck goes out right here to balance it, and the face over here becomes thicker, or the head becomes thicker.

Mm-hmm.

And so it's this cross pattern across the body. So from here, if this shoulder is higher, go down to the opposite hip, and then go down to the knee and then to the ankle. And so this zigzag throughout the body is basically telling us the torque pattern that most people have. Sometimes you'll meet somebody who has a different pattern because they had like a weird injury, like something so unique, but 99.9% of people that I've seen have this torque pattern between the left and the right side.

And with the jaw, And the skull. That was another moment where I just, it felt intensely painful and there was a lot of pressure and you wanted it to be over, but the release wasn't, it wasn't subtle. It was intense. I think I cried like a baby for a few seconds after. Yeah.

Yeah.

I can imagine a lot of people are holding a lot of tension within their jaw, their neck, how that connects to the back of their body, their posterior chain. Is doing fascial work within your jaw and your head, is that part of your daily practice?

Yes.

Yeah.

So like everything we're talking about right now that we did with you is all self-care. And so, you know, I, I use my own fingers to do it. And if I do a little bit every day, it's more than somebody else doing it on me.

Right.

But the jaw is, you know, we chew all day, we talk all day, and we don't express our truth. So, you know, every time that Somebody makes you feel a certain way and you don't— you feel that energy start to bottle up in your body and it goes up and up and up and up and up and up. And then you're like, no. And you stop it at the neck or the throat. Every time we do that, we actually tighten the jaw slightly. So that emotion starts to come up and it gets stored because it's releasing.

Mm-hmm.

It's coming up, it's about to go out, and then it gets stuck there at the, at the ability to speak. So whenever we work in somebody's jaw, people say to me all the time, it's like you're pushing on my like deep, deep, deep emotional bone. Like, it's like, it's like you're pushing my soul. Like I've had people literally say that to me where it's like, and it's this uncontrollable release. You know, when you cry and your whole body's shaking. And I just believe it's because we have so much stored in there from unexpressed truths. You know, in society today, if you express your truth to your boss, you get fired or, you know, in school you get bullied or you get kicked out and This is being blocked. And this is a super powerful tool for moving emotions, for manifesting, for creating the life that we want. You know, every time that you use your voice, it creates a vibration. That vibration also hits your cells, which changes the structure of the cells. So if you have positive words, your cells feel more positive and healthier. And they've measured this in many studies. But every time that we don't use this, we create a problem. And when we use it negatively, we create a problem in the body. And when I listen to people, people speak, you know, I can tell what their future is going to look like just based on the word choices that they're using.

Right.

It's like every word that they used was a limiting word. It was negative. It was identifying themselves based on something that happened to them in the past. So this mental loop that they're in of identifying it, the past, you know, I was in a car accident. It's the reason I have this. Then you ask them about What do they do for work? And somehow they tell you about the car accident again. Then you tell— ask them about their family, and then they tell you about the car accident again. You're like, oh my goodness, we're in a loop. So, you know, the only way to get through that loop is to go to the body, the emotions, or the energy. Those 4 things I talked about earlier. I'm not going to talk therapy you out of an identity that you've created or this mental model that you use.

Yeah.

I have to go to the other 3 states in order to unwind it. And if we do that, then all of a sudden thinking positive and speaking positive and expressing becomes easier.

Yeah, talk therapy, it's almost— it's so overrated. It's just one aspect of us. And if we're replaying that loop, I really believe that your words have wisdom and information. Your body responds to whatever you speak, but also what you think. And if you don't believe me, just go and listen to a sad song and just see how it makes you feel versus listening to something that gets you really excited and amped up and seeing how that makes That's case in point, right? You just have to understand that.

100%. Your thoughts are making you sick.

Yeah.

And your words are just a distilled, filtered version of your thoughts.

Yeah, yeah. In Ayurveda, we talk about the concept of digesting everything in our environment, not just what we eat— what we smell, what we think, what we listen to, what we feel, what we watch. So I think, um, also if you need more evidence to any of this, because I think a lot of people will hear the words but they don't necessarily believe it. And this isn't to say that, you know, there's nothing wrong with you. You don't have to blame yourself for not believing it. We just live in a society where we're not taught how to use this intelligence of our body, right? So it's almost like we need all of those videos about the fascia, around how water moves around sounds and frequency and music, just watch the shapes that it makes.

Yes.

For those to go viral so that we really understand like, hey, that water is actually alive inside Inside me. What can I do to do that inside me? Right. That can bring healing.

Water is a living organism and it responds to frequency and vibration, which is also your words or the music you listen to. And frequency and vibration is also thoughts. Thoughts create a frequency and a vibration within the body. So, you know, this hyper-intelligence is constantly responding to these things. But one of the things I wanted to say, just an exercise that the audience can use, If they want to, you know, if there's somebody in your life that you haven't been able to express to, this is very powerful. So what I do with people sometimes, you know, somebody's passed away or they can't— they haven't talked to their mom in 20 years and, you know, it's just not going to happen. Or they tell the person, the person's not willing to hear them. They don't feel heard.

That's a big one.

And then as a result of these things, they're holding guilt or shame or fear or anger in their bodies. So what I have them do is I, I say, I want you to imagine for a moment that I am that person. And I want you to say everything that you want to say to them, unfiltered, the way that you feel, the impact that that had. And, and also, you know, maybe something about letting it go. You know, I want to let this go. I'm sorry, I've been holding this. I forgive you. I forgive myself. And then also talk about the things And what I noticed when I do that with people is, number one, that they almost always get highly emotional. Number two, they feel lighter, their face changes, their, their whole presence changes. Number three is I've had people do it with me that haven't talked to people in like 20 or 30 years that the next day that person called.

Wow.

And I know, through telepathy tapes, I know through my own experience, thoughts are Not in our head.

Mm-hmm.

So if I'm talking to you, I am actually talking to that person. And, you know, we've all had a moment in our lives where you, you were thinking about someone and then they call you. So there's, there's something happening at the non-physical level. Dogs respond differently when you're coming home from work. They now just found plants respond differently. They change their behavior when they know you're coming home from work. So there's this non-physical component that nobody's talking— I mean, there's a lot of people talking about, but mainstream is not talking about. And This non-physical component is very powerful. So basically what you're doing is you're talking to that person. They're just not physically present. You're still talking to them. And there's no ego in the way because I'm the one receiving it. I'm just listening. I'm just an ear.

Right.

Because there's no ego in the way, it's heard. And when we do that, people heal. So if you are stuck in a relationship in your life and you genuinely want to move through it, this is an exercise that you can do with somebody that will hold space for you.

Yeah.

And the person holding space is not here to answer. They're not here to say anything. They're not here to, like, do anything. They're just literally there to be an ear for you. And once you close off this exercise, don't go and do it in the physical world. Don't go and talk about it now and try and explain yourself to your friend. Don't, you know, go and call that person. Allow that energy that you just moved to manifest and process in the physical world. And in the worst case, let's say nothing changed with that person. You feel better.

So powerful. I can imagine, you know, a lot of what the people that work with you, it's almost like you've given them permission to feel it, right? Instead of repress it or push it down or not think about it. And I'm always blown away when people think that they need to go and get a professional to do emotional cord cutting or any type of cord cutting, spiritual cord cutting. You can do it yourself.

100%.

Right. But I'm also thinking of conversations that I have with my children because I grew up in an environment where it wasn't safe, let's say, to talk about how we feel or any of those things. We just kind of had to bury it and move on. It's interesting as a mom now speaking to my kids around, well, let's talk about it. Is there anything that you want to share? Let's get it out of your body so that you don't store it in your body. Let's not go to bed upset. And yet, as adults, are we doing that for ourselves anymore? Right.

Most aren't. Yeah.

Most aren't. And the liberation that comes with that. So do we actually need the supplement protocol when we can make ourselves feel better?

Look, I, I mean, we have supplements. They're amazing.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Mainstream medicine also has a huge purpose, especially in like acute care and helping people. Like if there's an accident and my intention is to shine light on there's more than mainstream is talking about. And I, I know that the highest state is when I can literally close my eyes, think it, and it shows up in front of me. And, you know, there's now science showing a lot of this stuff where, you know, if you go into a meditative state and you disconnect from everything, your body, your, you know, your environment, from time, you enter the quantum and you can manifest and create from that place. And time no longer is a variable in it. So we operate off of Newtonian physics, which is if I go from A to B, it's going to take me this long if I'm going this fast. So if I want to manifest that car or health or whatever, oh, it's going to take me 6 months and I have to do all this stuff. It's very physical and takes time. It's exhaustive. But if I can disconnect from my body, if I can disconnect from my environment and from time, and I can go into this meditative space, I can actually go into the unlimited potential that's around us and manifest it in real time without time.

Yeah.

And that is the highest form of healing because I'm taking no physical action. I'm using nothing outside of me. I'm just literally using me and my tuning fork inside to, like a Wi-Fi signal, bring things back in. Maneuvers is a, is a way to help me get to that state faster. So, you know, a lot of people try to do meditation, but they're in so much stress that they're racing thoughts and they're all over the place. They're in pain, they're uncomfortable, they can't get to that state. So how do we get the body to be in its most flowing state? So then when we go into the non-physical, it's immediate, right? You can create anything from there. Anything is possible. People are changing their faces, you know, they're, they're healing cancers and all this stuff just from meditation alone. So yes, a supplement can work, or a technology, or a device, or something that I put, or a practitioner can help facilitate the process. My goal is How, for me, how can I remove myself from everything outside of me? Because if I can do it within me, then that is so empowering. I don't need to rely on something else when I have a headache or when I'm in pain. I know exactly what to do. I can just go to that space.

In quantum healing, have you studied zero-point energy?

Yes.

Yeah. The understanding of being able to get to a point and the way that I'm hearing you describe it, you're kind of attuning your frequency to just Mm-hmm. So imagine, and I use this a lot with my clients, so if you think about you right now in this moment, if you are a radio frequency tower and you still have connections to the bully from, you know, when you were 3 years old, your parents, the stuff that happened, your, you know, poor grades, kid at the candy shop, plus now as an adult, work stressors, kids, world politics, Insert all of those things. It's no wonder we're exhausted, for crying out loud, because we're attuned to all of those frequencies, right? But then we learn how to just shut them down into one mode. And I wonder if people, when they find meditation challenging, if that's what they find fearful because the no noise, without recognizing that the no noise is actually like limitless potential and abundance and lots of energy. It's everything.

Everything you want.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's, uh, it's interesting because people say all the time that, you know, I can't meditate.

Yeah.

Um, that's why Faster Maneuvers is— I like it because it's a movement meditation. But going back to I don't like to meditate, or I can't meditate, or it's too difficult or too challenging— that's the point.

Exactly.

You are challenging yourself by breaking yourself. Because when you sit down and, you know, you close your eyes and you you try and get into this meditative state, what happens is your brain goes to like, oh, I forgot to do my laundry, or, uh, this person's gonna react to me when I have this conversation, or it starts to go to all these familiar pathways. And if it continues to do that, those are the things that I'm putting my attention on. So those are the things that are gonna manifest in front of me. So the idea is to train your attention so you own it. Because when I sit in a meditation and it starts going off and it starts thinking about all these things, and yeah, it's like, wow, I didn't realize that my attention is literally just floating off without me consciously being aware of it. So how can I take back control of that attention? I have to call it back like a dog. I have to train it like a dog to sit. No, no, no, come back from that thought. Sit in complete nothingness. And if you can get to that state of nothingness, you basically delete All those programs in your brain that are hardwired, and you can rewire your identity. And so it's a much faster way to do it because we're just working from one of those 4 components, which is energy.

Mm-hmm.

I talked about energy, mind, body, and emotions. They all will help in anything in our lives. But if we can go to the source of what we are, energy, then it's the most efficient and the fastest. Why I like implementing the maneuvers is because it helps me get there even faster. Because if the body's in stress and you're, you know, drinking poison and hurting yourself and your stress and anxiety, sitting down and even going into that space is very challenging. So how do we make it so seamless?

I love the concept of fascial maneuvers as a moving meditation. That's brilliant. And maybe we should call out one specific thing also is the power of your breath that you're cueing through a session. I had a session with somebody years and years ago. And he, you know, worked on fascia, but this is someone that was just like digging in, like really digging into the point of, you know, having intense pain. That gave me no release. That just gave me intense pain. But talk to me about the cueing of breath and the power of the breath behind fascial maneuvers.

So there's 2 components. Number one is when you're doing the practice yourself. So because I said earlier, the body's pressurized, So we have outside pressure, inside pressure. Every time I go and I breathe air in, I'm expanding that balloon from the inside out. So what we do in fascial maneuvers is we counter-rotate. So the head goes one way, the body goes the other way, and we've basically compressed, twisted the body, and then we breathe. So we bring air pressure in. When you bring air pressure in, it expands like this. So it's almost like we're not stretching a muscle in a straight line. We are compressing the body, and then we are bringing air in to expand from the inside out when it's in a compressed state.

Mm-hmm.

And when you do that, you feel like you feel lighter. You feel like you have more space. You feel expanded because we're blowing up our balloon. We're literally bringing air in, not for the intention of oxygen necessarily for this exercise, It's as a pressure regulation device. So I'll breathe in through the nose to bring pressure more into the upper body and breathe in through the mouth. And with pursed lips, you bring air more into the lower back and the pelvic floor. So based on the position, you use different breathing.

Hmm.

Now, when I'm working with somebody, or when I'm, you know, teaching a group of people, the key is to synchronize your breaths. Because if you synchronize your breath, you create harmony and you amplify the effect for everybody. The more people that are present in a room doing the same action at the exact same frequency, you amplify it. It's like you're putting a bunch of batteries next to each other, all with the intention to, you know, evolve, grow, transform. So the more people— they've studied this with even meditation and all that— the more people doing the same behavior in sync with each other, the more powerful it is. So when we teach to, you know, groups of 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 people, all this self-healing thing, we have everybody sync their breath through the entire practice. And that, it just enhances it significantly.

You guys worked with HeartMath, heart coherence?

Not, not directly.

No. That's exactly what I'm thinking of, right? Coming into coherence together. And I'm so amazed at how the energy could shift. Yeah. Something— were you going to say something?

Well, I was going to say, we, when we realized this, We created something called a sync up. So, you know, before a podcast or, you know, a meeting or before you eat, anybody that's at the table, we would do a sync up. And this is really powerful because, you know, maybe you're late for a meeting, someone else is early, someone else is frustrated, and you're all coming in with different frequencies. When you're coming in with different frequencies, the conversation is going to flow differently. We might not hear each other and, you know, might be arguments when it's unnecessary. So we created a sync up, which is one fascial maneuver for 6 breaths. And when you do this, everybody at the table syncs and the conversation flows, or you come out of stress and you digest your food better if you're doing it before you eat. So it's a very powerful thing to synchronize with the people around you every once in a while because it creates that coherence in community. You know, when communities are malfunctioning, it's because there's There's different belief systems, you know, different things going on in the day. They're not doing something together. And you see this all the time with people who, you know, maybe they smoke with everybody else after work or during their work break, but then they stop. That was the time that they sunk up with the group. Now, 3 months later, they don't feel like they belong at the work, at that job. And now 6 months later, they leave because they stopped the behavior of smoking. They no longer synced with the community around them. Now they no longer felt they belonged and they left. So this synchronizing activity can be done just in 6 breaths.

Fascinating. And I imagine through that process is the uncovering around whether you're with the right people.

100%.

Who you want to be thinking with. I'm thinking about, I always look for rituals that we can incorporate. I think if you ritualize any type of an action, it becomes you. This would be great to do at the dinner table every night and great to do with children. Yeah, right. Imprinting with your kids so that you show them, they'll remember it when they're older. Yeah.

You want to try it?

Yeah, let's do it. The sink up.

Okay. So you can either cross your right foot over your left, or you can bring it up above your knee. So your right foot just over top. And then your right hand goes under your left armpit, and your left arm on top. So you're going to hug yourself. And then turn your head to the left, and your body to the right. Now we're going to breathe in together. So breathe in through the mouth.

2, 3.

In through the nose, out through the mouth. 2. 3. And you unwind and you'll feel the energy shift.

Totally. Yeah.

Sometimes it's weird when you're in a flow on a podcast and then you shift the energy and you're like, whoa, it's, it's like something changed.

It's like an endorphin rush.

Yes. And so what we did is we mimicked the same movement. With breathing. Now you could do any movement as long as you're mimicking each other.

I see.

So sometimes you're in a situation where you can't do that. So it's like hand on the heart, hand on the head, and we do the breaths. This position, why we chose this one is because it's the fetal position. And, you know, the fetal position where you're all crawled up and, and rolled up into a ball and you're hugging yourself, you're counter-rotated, that is like the core fundamental movement behind fascial maneuvers. And what we found is when we put people into a fetal position, they release trauma and emotions and stress. They, you know, and you can hold people in fetal positions on a table and they have deep releases. So doing it in the fetal position, you could do it either way. We just played around with one of them today.

What's powerful about this too, I notice, is Moving my, my arms, I grabbed myself and it felt like the feeling of holding myself or hugging myself, which I don't do very often, but it felt really nice.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's something about it.

There's something about it. Yeah. And I remember feeling that way with you guys also, because giving someone a hug is fine, but having someone hold you is a very different experience. And we're so void of touch today.

Do we put you in the fetal position on the ground?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So My favorite is when you're in the ocean or like a calm body of, uh, of natural water and you hold someone in the fetal position.

Yeah.

Because now it actually simulates being in the womb where they're floating in this water and they're just in this extremely safe space. It brings people's body almost like a time machine back to when they were in their mother's body for 9 months at a time when they were safe, they were growing, they were adapting, you know, all the hormones, all this stuff was happening. And if we bring the body into these familiar positions, we create physiological responses. It's the same as if you like stand up really tall and like, you know, you're trying to be confident, right? You walk into a room big. Or if you're like crouched over and you're, you know, playing small, it will make you feel a certain way. So if I can put the body in a position just by standing a certain way and feel more confident, then there has to be other positions we can put the body into that's going to create other feelings or responses. And the fetal position is one of them.

Good point. We're gonna make a reel out of that so that we can all practice that together. And I love that, um, we can do that seated because we can do this at any point. What would the impact be if we took these fascial maneuver snack breaks throughout the day?

Look, when people are in stress, there's a reaction to the world around them. And usually reactions are not good, right? Someone cuts you off in traffic and you have road rage. If I'm out of stress, then I see things differently. You know, your sight, your smell, your touch, your taste, your hearing, everything starts to enhance.

Yeah.

And you— it's almost like you have more space between you and the world around you. So when a situation hits you, your cup's not full. You can take that. Whoa, that was an— that was pretty intense what that person just said to me. You can process it in the moment and then you can respond You know, more consciously versus if your cup is full of stress, it's about to pour over. If you say one thing, I'm snapping, and that's very destructive. So if we can reduce the stress in people around us and ourselves, you know, we're going to see more flow, more creativity, better sleep, more energy. You know, we're going to see people being more kind, less fighting, less of all the other crazy things that are happening.

Mm-hmm.

Hurt people hurt people. It is, it is, it's a statement that's been used a lot and there's so much truth to that. So if I can take care of myself and I don't feel hurt on the inside, I'm not going to hurt people on the outside.

You take that out into the world. I think it's inevitable that we're going to continue to live in a world where stress is going to be high. We are probably going to be spending a lot of time behind screens with technology moving faster than we've ever experienced before. Like all of these things are inevitable. So the one thing that we can take control of today is our physiology. And I say that to put the reflection to listeners, why not try it? Like, why not try it to feel the impact? Because when you feel better in your body, forcing yourself to be healthy doesn't happen. Healthy becomes you. Forcing yourself to show up for like rituals that might feel challenging, it doesn't feel like force because it becomes you. Right. It's a very different feeling. And something else that, um, you made me remember when you were speaking is you cued me to do something different, which was to look up. I was looking down a lot. You said, look up, look up. And I was like, oh yeah, I can look up. Expansion.

Yeah.

Vastness, stillness, movement, nature. It was a very different experience for my body to just be cued to do that.

How often do we look up?

We don't.

Like, actually up.

Yeah, right.

I mean, for you, we're— this is actually very common when we're working with people. You know, they— there's a tendency to look down into the past. There's a little bit of like that shame and guilt and heaviness there. So we look down when we're walking. Now, you know, doing this practice, a lot of people tend to— they go to the ground. So we cue a lot of people to look up into like the new you, the new future, this new— we have to Unwire the patterns of how you walk and move. So you become it, you become that change. And having people like look up when they're walking is, it's important when they're doing the work.

And maybe remember, you don't have to go head down to be more focused. You can actually go head up and feel inspired and focused at the same time. You're also making me think about the vagus nerve. Do you talk about the vagus nerve and the connection to fascia?

Yes. And, you know, it's— I think it's actually quite a simple— over— maybe this is a little oversimplified, but the way that I like to explain it is, you know, the vagus nerve runs through the neck on both sides and it connects the, the upper body to the lower body. So you're, you know, your, your brain to your, your heart, your digestive system, all this stuff. If there's restriction in the neck, so tight jaw, tight, you know, making heavy decisions, tight neck. Right. Not speaking my truth tight. Well, this nerve, this vagus nerve, that's, that's being used for a lot of functions starts to malfunction. And I look at it like, you know, the signal's trying to go through and it's not going through as fast as it would like. So it goes to other nerves to support. So it takes detours. It's like there's construction on the highway. So we're going to go and take detours. So it's slower and it's less efficient. And the body does that. If a nerve isn't working properly, it will try and detour around it. To find the fastest, most optimal way to make it happen. So if there's too much tension here, the vagus nerve is constricted. What we do, we have a fascial maneuver for the vagus nerve, which is super simple. Like, you literally, you just push the skin down right over the, the first rib here on the collarbone, and you push the chin diagonally up, and then you move around and breathe. What you're doing is you're creating space through here. If things have space in the body, They will function optimally. It's that simple. Yeah. If they're stagnant, if they can't move, it's going to malfunction. You're not going to get nutrients, oxygen, electricity, all this stuff. So boom, both sides, and you'll create space for that and it will help. You'll notice a shift between the left and the right side.

Let's ask the vanity question then. Also, a lot of people are getting hooked on, you know, face yoga, or I think there's like face clinics where they stretch. But a lot of women are like terrified to even stretch their skin, which I think is absurd. Can you talk to us about that? And also the changes that you have noticed and see in others and how their faces might change?

Okay, wait, wait, wait, let me show you mine. Have I showed you this?

No.

Okay, so this is my 6-year transformation.

Whoa.

That was 6 years ago, 5 years ago, 4 years ago, and 3 years ago.

So the picture he's showing me, I don't— you look like a completely different person in the first photo. Your face is much more round. You actually have more wrinkles. Your eyes are drooping down and you've got an oval, a completely different shape of a face.

And the skin color.

The skin color looks yellow and yellow.

Yeah.

Compared to, well, now looking lifted. I see your jawline like really defined. Your brows look different. Your eyes look more open.

My forehead's bigger.

Your forehead is bigger. Your hairline almost shifts.

Yeah. Everything, everything changed. So this was my This is all doing it myself through fascial maneuvers and lifestyle. You know, when we want to change the structure of our face, it's not just the face. Because remember what I said, left shoulder higher, neck out here, face heavier here. So, you know, your face will torque because the lower body's torqued. So it's this, it's almost like you're playing, is it Jenga?

Yes.

Pull the blocks at the bottom. Yeah, you have to keep it balanced. So if you just work on your face, But the rest of the body is still dysregulated, it's just going to pull it back. So there's a number of things like, if you're going to work on the face, make sure you hit the rest of the body. You have to hit 3 zones. We break it down into 3 zones. Your head is— or the neck up is zone 1, the torso and the arms zone 2, and the legs zone 3. If you make a change in one zone, you have to change the other ones. So You have cheeks here, you have cheeks here, and you have cheeks here. You've got a nose here, you have a nose here in Zone 2, the xiphoid, and then you've got a nose, your tailbone. So you have mirroring effects in Zone 1, 2, and 3.

Mm-hmm.

And the jaw is here, the jaw here, and then the ankle bone is the jaw. It all makes that like L-shape. So if I change pressure in my jaw here, it's going to change pressure in my hip on the opposite side, and then on the ankle on the same side. And they're all related, so you can't just work on the face without working on the rest of the body. That's the first thing. The second thing is, you know, stretching— stretching the skin on your face. Stretching the skin on the face is not what causes wrinkles. Wrinkles are caused by usually dehydration, too many chemicals, you know, stress, emotions. But Wrinkles might not be such a bad thing. Because what they found in when they do Botox here, you are unable to express your emotions the same. Therefore, it helps people who, you know, maybe are dealing with depression or something like that, because it literally turns their emotions off. But for other people who want to express themselves, it turns them off.

Yeah.

I've heard women, it impacts their orgasms. Because if you can't express how you feel on your face, then it Then it affects the way that you feel the emotions and the connection. And then that ultimately goes to the amount of pleasure that you can experience. So the implications of changing something in the face is much more than I think we know.

Yeah.

I can't, I can't socially connect with you if I can't see how you're reacting to me. And if you can't feel your emotions because you've turned off the main thing that helps you express them, you know, it creates this disconnect. So, you know, being as natural as possible, and there's natural ways to do it, you know, getting out into nature, hydrating the body. Silica is a beauty molecule. It will help you rebuild your hair, your skin, your nails, your joints, your teeth. It will remove metals from the body. So there's some pretty simple things that you can do, and you just do it daily. You'll eventually get to the photo that I showed you.

You age backwards.

You age backwards.

Yes. And look, there's a lot of women, I'm sure, who are listening who feel so much better by doing those modalities. I used to, but I can't be somebody who's a practitioner in health and put those things into my body and choose organic and clean water and then pump my body full of toxins. It just doesn't make sense. Nor do we have information on what's going to happen long-term by using these chemicals. And if you do give specific focus to your nutrient intake, to stretching, to proper hydration at a cellular level, a lot of things that we've talked today, Yeah. you see a difference. You really do notice a difference. There's so many alternatives out there. We just need to put the effort towards them as well. So thanks for touching on that a little bit.

And I also think what we're talking about is a bandaid again, because another one, why, why are we going in that direction in the first place? And that's, you know, social programming is really deep these days.

Oh yeah, for women especially. Don't age, look like you're 30 when you're 80.

It's all marketing. And if you tell a lie long enough, eventually becomes true. And, you know, marketing is beauty and health and all this stuff. It's billions of dollars are being invested into programming you into feeling a certain way, so that you make certain decisions. And you think it's a conscious decision, but it's actually a program that's executing at the subconscious level, because you've been— it's, it's been told to you so many times. So I feel The solution is to disconnect from the programming first and then go to how can I now remove the damage of it, right? I can go and move my body and do all these things. So the programming, like disconnecting from the internet or from the news or from Instagram or from scrolling, and, and, and also being really mindful of what you eat, what you watch, because whatever you're watching is going into your subconscious. You know, I had a moment when we went on tour. I got on an airplane. It was the first time I'd flown in a while. And I looked around on the airplane and we're in the United States and every single TV that was playing on the back of someone's seat.

Mm-hmm.

I couldn't believe it. I haven't watched TV for like 7 years. I haven't watched movies or any of that. I've completely removed myself from that world. And when I was sitting in this plane, I, I almost had trauma from seeing what was on the screen.

You can't even hear everybody. Exactly.

It was in news here with like fires and bombs, and over here there was like shooting in a movie, and then over here was sex, and there was just so much programming happening. But because I'd removed myself for so long, I was able to see it, because a fish doesn't know it's in water until you take it out. And what happens is there's a desensitization of the systems that react to So if I show you one shooting and then another one and another one, another one, another one, another one, another one, eventually you don't feel the reaction anymore. You're— you've now desensitized yourself to that act. This is like kids playing shooting video games. It desensitizes them to that. So how do we get to the programming level before it gets to Okay, what can I do to make myself look younger or feel better?

I think this is so relevant for the time, right? Starting to ask questions about everything. What are you being sold? What are you being told? What is your doctor telling you to do? And kind of awakening this wisdom that I think we all have within us. Can you maybe share with listeners who are really curious about this work, and they want to go a little bit deeper, and they're understanding the connection between fascia and emotion and kind of like a stored way of being that they're ready to move on from. Is there a message of kind of like how to enter this world with curiosity?

I think there's 2 parts to it. I'll start with the fascial maneuvers. So for those who don't know what fascial maneuvers are, it's really a practice that we created to work on your own fascia. It was self-care. Like, we had a clinic with a 3,000-person waitlist. We closed it because we realized that people could help themselves. Just to put that into perspective, like we closed a machine because we knew that there was a better way. Self-care, this, this practice can be done for 15 minutes a day. You— we have seated ones for people who can't stand. We have ones that, you know, you can do standing ones for athletes, for moms, dads, kids. We have kids programs, like all this stuff. 15 minutes a day of doing the practice will reduce a little bit of stress and a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more. When you come out of stress, the body has more energy to focus on performance and healing and growth and transformation. But if you're in stress, you're not going to heal because the stress is taking all your energy to resolve it. So 15 minutes a day, you know, we have videos on our YouTube channel or, you know, an app. It's all donate. You can donate to it and you can just do the movements and you can share it with the people around you. So that's from the movement side of things. But if we were to go to the lifestyle side, you know, I think that lifestyle is a huge part of this because we live in a pretty toxic world. And, you know, instead of being controlled by it, there's things that you can do. You know, you can change your water, you can change your toothpaste, you can change your bedsheets, you can change your detergent, you can do all these things. So when it comes to the lifestyle aspect, you know, I find It's very easy to add more, more, more. What supplement can I take? You know, what, what can I change? What can I do here? My philosophy is more about substitution in the beginning phases. So, you know, what's your toothpaste? Okay, for the next month, we're going to focus on just your toothpaste. Go buy a new toothpaste and substitute it out. And then what'll happen is they start to feel a little bit better. They start to have a little bit more energy. Then we go to the next thing. Okay, let's change your detergent. And you start to slowly, systematically substitute all of the things that are— that you're doing every single day for like 10 hours a day, you know, sitting in clothes with detergent in it. And if you can make those changes, then it will have a huge impact on the way that you feel. Then it will get to a point where you say, what more can I do? Because you feel so good, you have more energy, and you want to— you want to leverage that momentum. You want more of it. Whereas a lot of the time, people try and take away. They try and subtract my coffee. I'm going to go on a diet. I'm going to— and they put themselves in this deficit of those things that were holding them stable.

Good point.

Right. So substitution in the lifestyle aspects of it. And then you've got the self-care with the maneuvers and with the blend of the two. Anybody can take back control of their own health for almost nothing. Like you can move your body for free. You just have to learn which movements you need that work best for you and you can take care of yourself.

So great. You have an abundance of videos available, not only through your app, but also through YouTube that people can look at at any point in time. For all of my clients, it's built into their protocol to start their day with the self-care protocol.

Amazing.

And I just think it's so profound and important. And what I'm learning in this line of work, I think that the human body is actually probably the most intelligent tool on the planet. And what you said about unlearning is so profound. I think that we need to unlearn how to be well, that our body actually already knows how to be well. And the work that you're doing is so powerful because you're really helping people understand that they are their own healer, that there is the capacity to feel really great in their bodies again. So maybe close off with one message to everyone. In terms of what you've seen, you've seen, and the transformation that you've happened over the past, what now, 15 years of doing this? Can you maybe call on like 2 or 3 big scenarios of the shifts that you've seen?

Yeah, I'll start with one, like a couple just outside of myself. You know, we've had people who've healed parts of their dementia or Parkinson's or scoliosis or autoimmune or tinnitus, or, you know, you name it, there's somebody who's reached out from our community who has done this themselves and healed. And that's very empowering, knowing that, you know, it doesn't matter what the discipline is. If you bring the body out of stress, it'll heal. For myself, you know, I, I don't even know how to put it into words, the amount of change that I've seen in myself. The world that I live in today, the way that I react to things, the way that I see things. You know, when you were saying, um, if you were to go into your client's body, how would they feel? I wish for so many people to feel the way that I feel in my body.

Yeah.

Because I didn't feel this way for most of my life. And it was the whole reason why I did this in the first place, because I was in so much pain. I was following this checklist built out to me by society of what I should and shouldn't do. And it got me to a point where I just didn't feel good. I was stressed, I was unhappy, I was doing all the things I just didn't understand. And that was the photo that you saw at the beginning. I look like A beat-up old man.

Seriously.

And I felt like it. And I was like, this just doesn't make sense. So when I had that realization that something needed to change and it wasn't what mainstream was telling me, I had to go and explore something outside, something much bigger, something out there, maybe more woo, who knows. But when I did that, I discovered that I can feel good in my body and I don't need anything outside of me. And more and more every single day, I disconnect from the things outside of me that make me feel a certain a certain way. I have less reliance on, uh, a coffee or a person or validation or, um, you know, recognition or whatever it might be. I don't need things from the outside to feel good on the inside. And in the world that we live in today, there's going to be more and more and more and more going on the outside, and people are going to continue to say, buy this, it will fix you. It never works. Go back to like the 10 machines that gathering dust in your room or in your garage, that you were promised a miracle pill. You have to do the work. You can't just sit there and expect a machine to heal you. You have to either change your life so it's so healthy that you don't have to do any self-care, or just do some self-care a little bit every day, and eventually it will add up and you will thank yourself for doing it.

Beautiful. What website can people go to?

humangarage.net.

Perfect. I can't wait to have you back. I'm so honored to call you a friend. Thank you so much for mirroring this.

Yeah, it was lots of fun. Appreciate it.